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Journalist Bob Woodward is a living legend in America. Together with his colleague Carl Bernstein, he discovered the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, when US President Richard Nixon had to resign. It looks like Woodward could now help end another president’s career.
In any case, Woodward’s latest revelations about President Donald Trump have what it takes to give the US election campaign a new dynamic in the latest outbreak before November 3. Above all, the journalist reveals, among many other things, that Trump was informed early on of the deadly threat posed by the coronavirus, but deliberately left the American public in the dark.
Bob Woodward has personally spoken to Trump a total of 18 times in recent months, interviewing other top government sources, and summing up all of his knowledge in a book to be published in the coming days under the title “Rage.” appear in the US The Washington Post and other outlets have been publishing the first excerpts bit by bit since Wednesday.
Trump probably hoped from the Woodward interviews that he would be able to share his vision of things and thus achieve a positive representation of his tenure thus far. The result is the opposite. Woodward draws a bitter conclusion from his intense investigation: “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
The book is already causing a stir in America. In recent weeks, Trump had managed with some success to draw public attention to his favorite “law and order” topic. But now his Covid crisis management, character and political style as a whole are the focus of the debate.
“Betrayal of the citizens”
Family members of coronavirus victims speak on major television channels and announce that their loved ones could still be alive if Trump had reacted more quickly to the danger. Trump’s challenger, Joe Biden, said his behavior was simply “disgusting” and “a betrayal of American citizens.” And West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who is on Trump’s side often because his constituency is made up of all Trump supporters, said laconically, “I don’t know how the president can survive this.”
Particularly explosive on the subject: Not only is Woodward an excellent reporter with an impeccable reputation, but he has also recorded many of his conversations with Trump. This makes it particularly difficult for the president and his supporters this time to dismiss journalistic revelations as “fake news” or “conspiracy”, as usual.
It is Trump’s own words that leave a fatal impression here. “This is deadly,” Trump said Feb. 7 in an interview with Woodward about the virus. The president already knew that the disease could be spread through the air: “You breathe the air and that’s how it is transmitted,” Trump said. “It’s very hard, very sticky. It’s also deadlier than the flu.”
Trump was in the picture early
According to Woodward’s book, Trump was always well informed. His security adviser, Robert O’Brien, warned him in a briefing on January 28 that the coronavirus would become “the greatest threat to the national security of the United States during his presidency.” Later, Trump obtained more detailed information about the virus through a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
In contrast to the public, Trump for a long time acted as if everything was half as wild. In early March, the president gave the impression that Covid-19 was comparable to the flu. At the same time, he announced that the virus would “go away by itself.” And: “We have it very well under control.”
In an interview with Woodward, Trump admitted on March 19 that he was deliberately minimizing the danger to the population. “I always wanted to downplay that. I still hold it back because I don’t want to panic.”
Even after the Woodward revelations, the president now defends himself with this argument. “The last thing you want is to panic in the country.” He always wanted to show confidence. He was a “cheerleader” for the nation, Trump said. He later added via Twitter that Woodward’s book was “boring.”
For Trump’s opponent, Biden, and his Democrats, these confessions from the president are, of course, a great starting point in the election campaign: They speak of a “lost February.” If Trump had used his knowledge and responded more quickly to danger, many thousands fewer people would have died, they say. But fearing bad economic figures and falling stock prices, the president did nothing.
“Trump knew it,” Joe Biden said. “He knew how dangerous that was. But even though the deadly disease struck our country, he refused to do his job, on purpose. It is a monstrous violation of duty, a lack of leadership.”
More revelations
There are other revelations in the book that put Trump in a bad position. Among other things, his former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is quoted as saying that Trump was unfit for the job and “dangerous.”
Former intelligence coordinator Dan Coats is said to have expressed suspicion that the president was hesitant in his policy towards Russia because Moscow might have something “against him.”
And so it goes: at another point, Woodward shows how Trump thinks about the Black Lives Matter movement and the issue of racism in the United States. The journalist asks the president if he is aware that both, as white men, have certain “privileges” over blacks. And if the president is working to understand that blacks in particular “in this country” feel a lot of “pain” and “anger.” Trump’s response: “No, I don’t feel that at all.”
An episode in which the president talks to Woodward about his relationship with such autocrats as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is absolutely curious.
Trump’s comment: “It’s funny, the tougher and bad you are, the better I get along with you. Someone has to explain that to me sometime, okay?”
